In This Issue

Reporting

Seven years ago, I flew business class on Qantas from Australia to California, a thirteen-hour trip. I hadn’t had much experience outside economy, but I didn’t want to look like a front-of-the-plane rookie, so I stowed my “amenity kit” without ripping it open, declined the…

When we got off the bus, at around 6 A.M., it was pitch dark, and the fields of Salisbury Plain were sodden after a night of desultory rain. Most of the passengers—who included a retired physicist and his wife, and a pair of young lovers peering at their smartphones while audibly…

We were going to be flying to the U.S.S. George H. W. Bush from the Navy base in Bahrain on a Grumman C-2A Greyhound, an ungainly propeller plane. There was nothing sleek or speedy about it. The sky was doing what it always did at this time: waiting for the sun to show up. The temperature…

On his thirteenth day underground, when he’d come to the edge of the known world and was preparing to pass beyond it, Marcin Gala placed a call to the surface. He’d travelled more than three miles through the earth by then, over stalagmites and boulder fields, cave-ins and vaulting…

In Eritrea, you turn eighteen and go into the Army, and you stay in the Army for many years, sometimes for the rest of your life. You work for a few dollars a day—in construction, farming, mining. Those who refuse are sent to prison. There is no other choice. We wanted a better…

Fiction

By late afternoon, Owen’s parents were usually having their first cocktails. His mother gave hers some thought, looking upon it as a special treat, while his father served himself “a stiff one” in a more matter-of-fact way, his every movement expressing a conviction that he…

The Critics

In her new book, Elizabeth Warren tells the story of her life in order to make an argument about America (the middle class is trapped in a vise of debt), which is the sort of thing politicians do when they’re running for office. Warren, who spent most of her career as a law-school…

When Theodore Dreiser wrote “An American Tragedy,” in 1925, he meant that “American” to give some dignity to a sordid murder story. But sometime in the past forty years the sordidness got the upper hand over the adjective: “American Graffiti,” “American Gigolo,” “…

The Bright Continent, by Dayo Olopade (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). In this upbeat study of development in Africa, Olopade identifies the great obstacle as “formality bias”—the tendency of outsiders to recognize solutions to African problems only when they come from governments…

The animated series “Adventure Time,” now entering its sixth season on Cartoon Network, is the kind of cult phenomenon that’s hard to describe without sounding slightly nuts. It’s a post-apocalyptic allegory full of helpful dating tips for teen-agers, or like World of Warcraft…

Style, when it works, can be a startling and pleasurable thing. But the American response to it is often complicated. It’s not unusual for one’s fellow-citizens to resist imaginatively decorated people, environments, or cuisines: falling for such manicured charm, they fear, would…

In a funny scene in Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball,” Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, aided by his in-house sabermetrics genius, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), successfully trades for a player he wants by calling other general managers on the phone…

The Talk of the Town

In Kigali last week, thousands of mourners trekked through a thick predawn fog to converge on Amahoro Stadium. By midmorning, in hot, raking sunshine, they filled the stands. The Army band, with sousaphones flashing, marched to the center of the field, arrayed itself there on a round…

The singer Steven Demetre Georgiou Adams has never maintained one identity long. As a teen-ager in sixties London, he took the stage name Cat Stevens—but his first hit, contra his new feline brand, was “I Love My Dog.” Next, after a near-fatal bout of tuberculosis, he transformed…

Last Monday morning, anyone around town who stepped outside expecting either a loamy first whiff of spring or some more familiar indigenous reek discovered instead the faint but unmistakable smell of woodsmoke. Not burning-building woodsmokiness, which in these parts, thanks to the…

Two aspiring trampoliners arrived the other day at Streb Lab for Action Mechanics (SLAM), a fitness and dance studio in Williamsburg, described by its founder, Elizabeth Streb, as a “beta test for a new cultural paradigm.” (It is housed in a former mustard depot.) Jumper No. …

The electric-car company Tesla seems like everyone’s darling these days. Its stock, even amid a pervasive selloff in the tech sector, is up nearly forty per cent this year. It has announced plans to build a five-billion-dollar battery factory, which various Southwestern states …

Goings On About Town

In 1998, when “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” premièred Off Broadway, at the Jane Street Theatre, the show’s clever black humor and the catchy glam-rock-influenced songs offered an inspired twist on the drag-queen stereotype and thrilled audiences. In the story (the book is by…

Long ago, in the late nineteen-seventies, when I treated Manhattan like one big discothèque, or the glittery gritty mirrored universe in “A Chorus Line,” I also went to parties. The best were hosted or, rather, curated by Owen Dodson. Justly renowned for his work as a drama …

Onstage, the fifty-one-year-old British singer and songwriter James Hunter has the energy of a man half his age, or younger. With a soulful tenor that recalls a range of R. & B. giants, from Sam Cooke to Bobby Bland, Hunter leads his band, the James Hunter Six, through strict…

During Prohibition, the Colony Arcade Building was part hat factory, part tea salon. Today, as the Refinery Hotel, it’s just as charmingly weird, and home to two bars. The Refinery Rooftop—accessible by elevator, with rigmarole—has a stunningly gorgeous view of the Empire State…

Unless you’ve got a hankering for a Subway sandwich or a Five Guys burger, the Shops at SkyView Center, a mall packed with big-box stores like Target and Best Buy, may seem like the least likely place to eat in Flushing. And yet, around the corner from Chuck E. Cheese and just …

Cartoons

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